Cart

Tag Archives | Koch Industries

Once upon a time Charles and David Koch, the notorious Koch Brothers, were considered to be somewhat under the radar in terms of being the puppet masters of the far right politicians in the United States. In the wake of films like Robert Greenwald’s Koch Brothers Exposed and this expose in Rolling Stone, that is certainly no longer the case:

The enormity of the Koch fortune is no mystery. Brothers Charles and David are each worth more than $40 billion. The electoral influence of the Koch brothers is similarly well-chronicled. The Kochs are our homegrown oligarchs; they’ve cornered the market on Republican politics and are nakedly attempting to buy Congress and the White House. Their political network helped finance the Tea Party and powers today’s GOP. Koch-affiliated organizations raised some $400 million during the 2012 election, and aim to spend another $290 million to elect Republicans in this year’s midterms.

The Kochs are apparently feeling the blowback from their efforts to buy a Congress that will do their bidding, and are launching a new public relations effort with two aims: making them appear as warm and fuzzy patriotic job creators and attacking liberal groups. The Washington Post reports:

In coming weeks, Koch Industries plans a fresh round of television ads casting itself as an all-American company with a diverse workforce—part of the first nationwide marketing campaign it has ever undertaken. The corporation is considering spots similar in concept to a Web video currently on its YouTube page in which military veterans who work at Koch Industries compare the values of the armed forces to those of the company. […]At the same time, the company is adopting a more confrontational approach in the political arena, seeking to undermine its antagonists on the left.

David Koch (Koch Industries) called it “too tempting”, so he boned up $35 million to put more bite into his public persona. The dino hall at NYC’s American Museum of Natural History now sports his name. One dinosaur supporting another? From the Washington Post:

David H. Koch, the executive vice president of Koch Industries and a prominent supporter of conservative causes, has donated $35 million to the National Museum of Natural History.

The gift, which was announced by the Smithsonian Institution on Thursday, will go to a new dinosaur hall, which has been high on the list of needed renovations at the museum.

The Koch gift is the largest single donation to the Natural History Museum and the fifth largest in Smithsonian history.

Charles and David Koch, the billionaires who own companies like Georgia Pacific and bring you products like Brawny paper towels, are notorious for their singularly harsh vision for a more conservative America, with the Tea Party movement their most visible political mouthpiece. Both they and the Tea Party movement have been largely pigeon-holed as extreme and outside the mainstream by the media (Fox News excepted, of course), so now they are looking to buy the Tribune Company’s eight regional newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun.

In case you’ve forgotten just how mean the Kochs’ vision for America is for the average American, check out the powerful documentary Koch Brothers Exposed. The New York Times has the story on the planned newspaper acquisitions:

Three years ago, Charles and David Koch, the billionaire industrialists and supporters of libertarian causes, held a seminar of like-minded, wealthy political donors at the St.

In the aftermath of the Citizens United ruling granting First Amendment rights to corporations, companies such as Koch Industries are telling their employees whom they should vote for, while simultaneously forbidding workers from expressing political opinions, In These Times reports:

In a voter information packet obtained by In These Times, the Koch Industries corporate leadership informed tens of thousands of employees at its subsidiary, Georgia Pacific, that their livelihood could depend on the 2012 election and that the company supports Mitt Romney for president. The packet arrived in the mailboxes of all 45,000 Georgia Pacific employees earlier this month.

Ironically, while the Kochs have been taking advantage of Citizens United to expand political communications to employees, they have also capitalized on weak labor laws to limit the political speech of those employees.

A new Georgia Pacific social media policy [PDF] implemented earlier this year that warns, “Even if your social media conduct is outside of the workplace and/or non-work related, it must not reflect negatively on GP’s reputation, its products, or its brands.” Given the policy, the workers were scared to appear next to a candidate the Kochs do not support with the plant in the background.

Everyone seems to be investigating Charles and David Koch lately, with exposés of their corrupt political behavior popping up in places like the New Yorker, AlterNet, ThinkProgress, and Brave New Foundation’s film Koch Brothers Exposed. Naturally, the billionaire brothers don’t like the attention, so they’re responding to it by smearing the activists and journalists. In their panic, they have now taken out Google ads attacking me and plastered an ominous image of my eyes on their website, like so:

They made me look like Emperor Palpatine. But who’s really representing the Dark Side here? The truth is that the billionaire brothers bankrolling the conservative movement are using their wealth in a way that should be terrifying to anyone who thinks democracy is about more than pulling a lever every two years and letting rich folks take care of the rest.

Accordingly, here are 10 facts that every American should know about who the Kochs are and what they’re doing to our country.… Read the rest

My filmmaking team and I recently told the story of the small town of Crossett, Arkansas, where residents are giving powerful testimony about the prevalence of cancer in their community and linking it to a nearby chemical plant owned by Charles and David Koch. This revelation came on top of the already-known facts that the Koch brothers are among the top 10 polluters in the United States and led the charge (unsuccessfully) to keep formaldehyde from being named a carcinogen.

Yet instead of cleaning up their operations, the Kochs are now attacking me personally.

Just as my new film Koch Brothers Exposedis set for release, one of the Kochs’ corporate spokesmen, Greg Guest, says I’m “a very, very slanted filmmaker” who has made “erroneous and false claims” about the Kochs’ operations. What he fails to mention is that my office has contacted the Koch brothers numerous times for an explanation of what’s false about our exposés, including the one on cancer.… Read the rest

The Koch brothers have an attack-dog website of their own, KochFacts.com, which they have used defensively and reflexively to attack me and others who’ve questioned or investigated the Koch brothers’ vast $100 billion business. The Koch brothers refuse to testify in Congress about their interest in the pipeline, but they’ll make a web video asserting their innocence.

We took the Kochs’ video retreat and added a few facts from the historical record.

Maybe the Koch brothers prefer to let their allies in Congress speak for them? House Energy and Commerce Committee chair Rep.… Read the rest

Imagine Charles and David Koch testifying, under oath, in Congress.
Even though the billionaire oil industry brothers continue trying to dodge accountability, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) invited the Koch brothers to testify and answer a few simple questions about how the Kochs are positioned to gain financially by the Keystone XL oil pipeline, a 1,700-mile long boondoggle that would make the Koch brothers even richer.
There’s ample evidence linking the Kochs’ business to the Canadian tar sands, which is the dirtiest energy in North America. Indeed, the Koch brothers’ stand to be among the pipeline’s biggest beneficiaries. Even the Koch brothers’ website confesses to being a party to tar sands oil.
The Koch brothers are doing whatever they can to avoid testifying in Congress, despite the fact...

The radical commies at Bloomberg have published a sweeping expose of the Tea Party-funding behemoth Koch Industries, claiming that standard practice at the company includes bribing government officials around the world, secretly selling technology to Iran, and general contempt for the legal and ethical constraints by which people normally operate:

In May 2008, a unit of Koch Industries Inc., one of the world’s largest privately held companies, sent Ludmila Egorova-Farines, its newly hired compliance officer and ethics manager, to investigate the management of a subsidiary in Arles in southern France. In less than a week, she discovered that the company had paid bribes to win contracts.

“I uncovered the practices within a few days,” Egorova- Farines says. “They were not hidden at all.”

She immediately notified her supervisors in the U.S. A week later, Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Industries dispatched an investigative team to look into her findings, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its November issue.